‘No Election Deniers’ in the Democratic Party? Yeah, Right

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at redistricting efforts and election denialism in the Democratic Party and cover more media misses.

Hakeem Jeffries Finally Called Out for Election-Denial Hypocrisy

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) was made to answer on Sunday for his past claims that there are “no election deniers” in the Democratic Party.

Jeffries appeared on Face the Nation, where host Margaret Brennan noted the House minority leader himself has claimed President Trump will “rig” the midterm elections.

“Democrats were appalled when President Trump used language like that,” Brennan said. “How do you justify using that now? Doesn’t that undermine faith for voters you need to show up?”

Jeffries, of course, doubled down.

“No, I’ve been using that term in the context of Donald Trump’s unprecedented effort to gerrymander congressional maps in a partisan fashion all across the country in order to rig the midterm elections and deny the ability of the American people to actually decide who should be in the majority as it relates to the House of Representatives,” Jeffries said.

“You know Democrats are also going through gerrymandering and redistricting,” Brennan shot back.

“No. No. No. Well, Democrats are going to push back aggressively to make sure that we have fair maps across the country, not partisan gerrymandering, which Republicans have initiated in state after state after state,” Jeffries insisted.

Jeffries’s suggestions that the midterm elections could be rigged were not his first foray into election denialism. Jeffries previously posted on X that Trump’s 2016 presidential victory was illegitimate.

“The more we learn about 2016 election the more ILLEGITIMATE it becomes,” Jeffries wrote in February 2018. “America deserves to know whether we have a FAKE President in the Oval Office.”

And in 2020, he said “history will never accept you as a legitimate president,” referring to Trump.

Meanwhile, other Democrats, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Representative Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) also claimed in 2016 and 2017 that Trump’s election victory was “illegitimate.”

And of course, there’s the party’s election-denier-in-chief, Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp defeated Abrams in the state’s 2018 gubernatorial election by more than 54,000 votes, but Abrams failed to formally concede to Kemp for many years and claimed the 2018 election was “stolen from Georgians.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger suggested in October 2021 that Abrams’s false claims about the 2018 election were a blueprint for Trump’s false election claims in 2020.

And on the topic of redistricting, former Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called foul on claims from another Democrat, California Governor Gavin Newsom, that proposed redistricting in the state is temporary.

“I think when he — when they say this is temporary, there is no such thing. I mean, the longest programs are government programs that are temporary. Okay, just remember that if this is a tax program or if it is the redistricting program, anything that is temporary with government is permanent,” he said during a recent appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.

“In the year 2032 when the independent redistricting commission is supposed to come back, they’re going to say, ‘Wait a minute. There’s still gerrymandering going on in Texas. There’s still gerrymandering going on in Ohio. There’s still gerrymandering going on in Florida. We have to continue with gerrymandering.’ This is what’s going to happen. They will find an excuse. So therefore I don’t think it is temporary. So that’s total fantasy,” Schwarzenegger said.

Californians will head to the polls this Election Day to vote on a redistricting proposal that would add as many as five Democrat-held seats in Congress, an effort Democrats are making in light of Texas’s redistricting efforts to favor Republicans.

NR’s Rich Lowry called out the Democrats’ hypocrisy on the issue of redistricting back in August, arguing that the party has “excelled at gerrymandering in states such as Illinois and California” and therefore has “no cause to complain when the GOP does it, too.”

Newsom, for his part, recently dismissed criticism of Proposition 50, the redistricting measure, and said, “Spare me the moral high ground.”

Headline Fail of the Week

“Maine Senate hopeful changed tattoo ex-aide calls antisemitic,” reads a headline from the Washington Post.

“Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner says he covered up tattoo that resembles Nazi symbol,” reads another from CBS News. Politico and CNN also claimed the tattoo “resembles” a Nazi symbol.

The tattoo was the Totenkopf, “a very specific skull-and-crossbones image infamously sported by the Schutzstaffel (the Nazi SS). (The SS initially served as Adolf Hitler’s personal protection agency before expanding into the paramilitary organization responsible for the Holocaust)” explains Becket Adams for NR, who notes the media’s Nazi symbol hunters have curiously taken a holiday when it comes to reporting on the Democratic Senate candidate:

Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that outlets such as the Washington Post worked to legitimize even the most insane Nazi-related conspiracy theories, including the one that suggested that the organizers of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference had arranged their stage design into the shape of an obscure Germanic rune associated now with the Third Reich. It wasn’t so long ago that newsrooms such as Politico gave credence to the idea that multibillionaire weirdo Elon Musk had given the Nazi Sieg Heil salute at a 2024 inauguration rally. It wasn’t so long ago that newsrooms such as the Associated Press and CNN warned that the “seemingly innocent” OK hand gesture was no longer an ironic inside joke for online trolls, but an official symbol of “hate.”

Media Misses

• An MSNBC panel suggested Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger isn’t doing better in the polls because of sexism. Yet Spanberger’s opponent, Winsome Earle-Sears, is also a woman. The comments came during a conversation about the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey. Jonathan Lemire attributed Spanberger and Representative Mikie Sherrill’s failure to pick up major leads in their respective races to misogyny. “This is something that a lot of Democrats are grappling with right now,” Lemire continued. “They’ve nominated women two of the last three elections for the presidency — lost both. There are some who say, ‘Well, we can’t do that again. The stakes are too high.’ But, of course, that does fall into the same misogynistic trap.”
• Fox News anchor Bret Baier fact-checked Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat, during an interview last week in which Pritzker falsely claimed that Chicago isn’t among the 30 American cities with the highest murder rates.”Well, here’s a map — most populous U.S. cities: 17.47 per 100,000 population. Chicago is number one over Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix, Los Angeles, New York and San Diego,” Baier told Pritzker. “Why does Chicago have the highest murder rate of all the big cities?” he asked.Pritzker argued the city is not in the top 30 in terms of its murder rate and that the city’s homicides have been cut in half over the last four years.

  But according to a report from Illinois research nonprofit, Wirepoints, Chicago had the highest total number of murders in 2024 compared to all major U.S. cities in 2024, with 573 people killed that year alone. Chicago’s rate of 21.5 homicides per 100,000 people placed it at number six.